The Diablo III Website outlines some new hotfixes applied to Diablo III. These once again carry a warning that these note may contain spoilers for anyone who has not completed the action/RPG, but this is a generic warning that doesn't really apply in this case. Gold drops form ash post and vases have been nerfed, leading to complaints that this prevents players from being able to farm them as before for the gold required to buy the items from the auction house required to play the game at the hardest levels, which seems illustrative of some balance issues yet to be worked out. Also, the I am (we are) Diablo III thread on Reddit is live where game designers Wyatt Cheng, Andrew Chambers, and Jay Wilson all discuss the present and future of the game.

Dev wrote on Jun 10, 2012, 16:53:If you really think that many gold farmers won't use methods with the least cost and trouble, regardless of the selling price of gold, "then I don't know what else to say, you're hopeless."

Maybe if you tried not being so invested in a position and actually thought about it. Did you stop to think that bots can pickup items as well as gold? Not all items are easily liquidated into gold and the auction house item cap further adds to that problem. Item sales were a big factor in Diablo II, I played years of it. In fact when the value of gold becomes so commoditized that it can't be trusted due to botting then players only perceive value in the items themselves. Yes, botters will make money off gold as they have been doing already but they will also make money using the RMAH. There are countless Diablo II item sales sites that facilitated this already, the precedent and history are well established. Obviously the companies would prefer it if people used their sites directly but that doesn't mean they won't use Blizzards infrastructure to supplement their own too. It doesn't have to be companies either, many independent botters will do this to make money and in such scale that the effect will be similar.

"Maybe if you tried not being so invested in a position and actually thought about it. Did you stop to think that" items can easily be traded among accounts? I'm sure there will be items that are valuable, and the bots can look for those and funnel them all to a few accounts that deal with a 3rd party with a US address. Meanwhile, a goodly amount of the asian gold sales will continue on the black market as long as blizzard makes it easy to do so and has all the disadvantages on the side of going legit. Basically so far, blizzard isn't putting up any barriers to entry of going black market and IS putting up all sorts of barriers to going legit.